I felt that if my men could be trained to hit their adversaries with their horses, it was a matter of small amount whether, at the moment when the onset occurred, sabres, lances, or revolvers were used; while in the subsequent mle I believed the revolver would outclass cold steel as a weapon.

Under standard regularity conditions* on the density function, the MLE is consistent and asymptotically efficient, with an estimated variance-covariance matrix that approaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound, with root(n) convergence.

* Proof rests on approximating the likelihood surface by a quadratic Taylor series expansion around the maximum; regularity conditions are the type of smoothness requirements that make such an expansion valid.